I got tired of waiting for Boy Erased to hit streaming, so I went ahead and watched this (I had been planning on doing a double-header). I liked it well enough; it certainly captures a particular kind of subcultural kitsch, unrelated to the conversion therapy stuff. For the rest--well, as Joel points out there's problems with characterization here. Namely, no one in the movie except Cameron has much of a personality (which is an especial problem when, late in the film, a not-unexpected tragedy occurs). I would have liked to see some more development on that end.
For her part, Cameron comes into the movie already pretty unconflicted about her sexuality (save for a couple of mid-movie scenes), so she doesn't have much of any journey, herself. Which is--well, it's a problem insofar as she gets to play the role of disaffected outsider looking in at the funny kids who really believe this stuff. I suppose if she did buy into the conversion therapy thing it would be a much darker story, but I found myself wishing that she at least bought it a little for the sake of having some dramatic tension.
That said--the performances are pretty delightful, when they have stuff to do.

This show is still bonkers, by the way. Season 3 hasn't been quite on the level of the first two, but it's got some really good stuff going on in it (last week's episode was among the best they've done, in spite of the Veronica plot).

This movie opens this week in China, so I went to check it out. Somewhere in here there’s a really good movie, as opposed to a barely adequate one. As it is, this flick is way, way overstuffed. It could easily lose thirty minutes and a whole plot-thread and wind up being a stronger movie. But it has a certain shaggy charm, all the same.

The real crime here is this movie. It’s bad, y’all. Really bad. The plot is so over-complicated and under-explained that it makes the Pirates of the Caribbean flicks look minimalist and clear. Character motivations appear and disappear out of thin air. There’s about as much dramatic tension as an episode of Saved by the Bell. Outside of a few reliably-solid actors (Jude Law, for instance, or the again-underutilized Ezra Miller), pretty much nothing in this movie works.

It's less effective than a typical MCU movie at doing what it wants to do, for sure; but what it wants to do is much more interesting and peculiar than anything most MCU flicks attempt (all exceptions admitted). So I balance those against each other.
One thing I get a kick out of, in retrospect, is the way in which the threat-to-the-whole-globe stuff is basically (at least, in the cut I saw....) tossed out there. There really isn't any particular concern for that aspect; it's almost openly a generic trope that the movie feels the need to include but doesn't really care about (or expect us to care about).

So this came to China (I know, right?) and so I wound up seeing it. It’s about on a level with MCU flicks, tbh. It’s more fun than INFINITY WAR and ANT MAN AND THE WASP. Tom Hardy is really funny. But the last half-hour is incredibly boring.

This movie's been coming up a lot recently. First, The Unloved did a piece on it four months ago, which caught my attention (of course):
Then the YouTube algorithm decided I needed to see a video from 2014:
And then the Now Playing podcast put up a new episode on the movie.
So, basically, it seems like I'm going to have to watch this at some point. (Besides which, visually interesting horror set in an American small town is kind of my thing)

I totally lost interest about the middle of last season. I kind of wanted to check this season out because I've been convinced for a while that the real MVP of the show is Robin Wright, but I haven't been able to muster the interest (or the time).

I think in general that not having a forum devoted to politics would be the most, um, politic decision possible. I (obviously) don't have a problem invoking politics in discussing art; my whole take on Captain America: The Winter Soldier was basically a political rumination, and I'm sure I could think of other examples (my eventual review of Fuqua's The Magnificent Seven, for instance, derived from politically-inflected thoughts posted here).
That said, I think it's probably for the best not to have a place specifically devoted to the arena of politics, for a couple of reasons. First, we're an international board, so there's that to consider. Second--frankly, this is a personal thing, but I talk and think and worry about politics all the time, lately, and it's kind of nice to have a place where I can go and not worry about having to ignore/block/mute/whatever threads. A safe space, if you will.
W/r/t the specific issue of homosexuality, it's complicated by the fact that religion and politics step all over each other (at least, in the U.S. they do); people with political reasons for supporting/opposing LGBTQ rights will offer religious reasons and vice-versa. I'll note that we have a thread on "Sexuality and Christian Belief," which started under a more specific title and which is pretty much devoted to discussing LGBTQ issues (similarly, we do have a recent-ish thread on "The U.S. Evangelical Vote," so I guess the "no politics" rule has been flexible for some time).